


Caro, Carnis

by Eustace (Sibylline)



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Catholic Guilt, Catholicism, Eating Disorders, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-03
Updated: 2015-05-03
Packaged: 2018-03-26 10:53:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3848266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sibylline/pseuds/Eustace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the daredevil kinkmeme prompt for Matt with guilt-based food issues; it's served with a heaping side of Catholic guilt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Caro, Carnis

It seems like every religion holds a place for fasting. Catholicism is no different, where Lent is the ancient penitential preparation for Easter. Lent is forty days and forty nights, the time that Christ spent wandering the desert, fasting, with the devil and his temptations as his only companions. Lent breaks open on Ash Wednesday, you feel the grit of holy cinders as the priest traces a cross on your forehead. _Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,_ the priest says. On Ash Wednesday, you carry your penitence on your forehead. The other thirty nine days, you carry it inside you. (All three hundred and sixty-five, you carry it inside you, if your name is Matt Murdock)

...

In Catholicism (the orphanage, the school, the pews) he learns. He learns to swallow down temptation. He learns to mortify the flesh, because the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. You're only flesh and blood after all, Matt Murdock, they'll tell you. But they're wrong.

The flesh is weak. The body is an obstacle to be tamed. Matt learns first to master his senses: peel away distractions and pare down the input until he finds the bones : first to the movements of those around him, to see what his eyes have cannot. A layer further, though, and he can sense the unseen: hear the spike of a heartbeat, smell the cold sweat of fear, reduce a cavalcade of sirens to just one.

....

It's at the orphanage, during the Lenten fast, that Matt discovers that the fast has other effects on him. While his stomach grumbles, empty and complaining, His senses are sharper and more controlled. Matt's hearing sharpens, his skin becomes more sensitive, the smells of the city intensify. He listens to the city, his city, and he ignores his stomach.

.....

 

In college, food is a distraction from studying. He chooses other appetites-- a hunger for knowledge is the cliche, but still he devours books, fingers flying over the Braille; takes office hours literally and spends afternoons with professors, he drinks in the conversations.

In lectures, the silent snarl of his empty stomach is enough to counterbalance the cacophony of tiny noises: heartbeats and breathing, clicking pens and gum-chewing, the skritch of ballpoints and the insectoid hum of overhead fluorescents, the scent of thirty combinations of shampoo and deodorant and underneath it all the smell of anxious sweat. His stomach is clean and empty, and the burn of hunger eats up all the distractions.

Food is a necessary thing, eaten because it fuels the machine of his body. He can ignore the gnawing in his stomach. He can drink cup after cup of black coffee to blunt the hunger. When his hands start shaking and his train of thought derails into hypoglycemia, he eats. He eats just enough to fuel the machine.

***

In law school, he has Foggy.

Foggy, who can't cook for shit, who orders takeout for two without asking. Foggy, who buys him a vanilla cone anytime the ice cream truck comes through campus (even though the first time he did nearly made Matt cry, which required some explaining) Foggy, who microwaves tupperwares of his mom's casseroles and feeds them to Matt and talks about how he was meant to be a butcher. With Foggy, eating doesn't feel like an indulgence. It feels like breaking bread together, feels like a sacrament.

Foggy who notices the way that Matt presses his fingers into his own bruises when he doesn't know that Foggy is looking.

It's a thing, helps Matt focus. Matt worrying at his lower lip with his teeth until it bleeds, the taste of iron in his mouth drowning out a host of little distractions, pressing his fingers into the dark margins of bruises across his kneecaps, thighs, making new little fingerprints of pain. They're easy enough to explain; the blind guy stumbles into things (so clumsy). He can feel the weight of Foggy's gaze on him, though. Foggy tosses Chapstick across the room when Matt's chewing his lip raw, tells him that he's gotta keep his wingman looking pretty. Foggy can be distractible, too.

When they've been out at a bar and too much alcohol blurs inhibitions, Matt lets his guard slip, arm wrapped around Foggy's shoulders and Foggy's arm around Matt's waist as they stumble across campus. Blindness is often a convenient excuse. He can feel the heat of Foggy's body pressed against his side like a brand as they slouch into each other on the library steps, the fog of their breath lingering together in the cold. He feels something sweet and tender in his chest, chasing away the chill and the emptiness.

Matt touched Foggy's face only once. Their veins were flooded with scotch, and they were on the carpet of the dorm room because the couches seemed very far away and elusive. Foggy had asked him about that trick he did with girls, the face reading thing. He'd asked Matt plaintively why he never read him, whether he didn't want to know what Foggy looked like.

So Matt had rolled over and put a hand to Foggy's cheek, used the other one to card along Foggy's hair, tracing his brow, moved his hands slowly, carefully, feeling the brush of his eyelashes feather-light on his fingertips, feeling his eyes still moving beneath the tender skin of his eyelids. Matt traced his fingers on the soft skin under his eyes, the curve of his cheek and the shape of his chin, thumbing across the line of his lips. He felt them half-part under the pads of his fingertips, could feel the warm huff of Foggy's breath, his pulse light and rapid as a bird's.

  
Foggy asks him what he thinks, mouth moving supple under his touch, and Matt tells him "beautiful, fucking beautiful, Foggy", the words tumbling out before he can catch them. He feels Foggy's breath hitch up under his hand, the stutter in his pulse, and he snatches away his fingertips like he's been scorched.

Matt felt a hunger rise in him hot and sharp, his sudden desire like an animal clawing up the ladder of his ribs. He rolled over to bury his face in the shag of the carpet. It felt like sandpaper on his face.

(He doesn't eat for three days, after that)

He has desires, appetites, hungers, but he learns to master them.

The book of Romans tells him, _put to death what is earthly in you_ : impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness. Matt intends to starve it to death.

.....

The first night he spends hooded in black in that railyard. The next day he spends drinking black coffee and running a thumb over his bruised knuckles, back and forth, hands moving like he's praying the rosary.

After that Matt spends his days in the office and his nights out on the rooftops. He lives off of protein bars, which have flavors according to the packaging but mostly taste like nothing; he can chew them mechanically, and wash down with more black coffee.

He doesn't need a mirror to know that his body is whipcord muscle strung over bone, flecked with an increasing percentage of scar tissue. He pares his body down, leaves only what is necessary to be most efficient.

...

When Karen and Foggy order Chinese food, they drag Matt out of his office to eat dinner with them. They all huddle around the table and sit with knees and elbows bumping, fumbling with chopsticks.

Karen orders things with vegetables, steamed baby bok choy and broccoli florets and bean sprouts. She orders things that taste green, laughs and feeds them to Matt and Foggy; her deft hands have conquered the chopsticks.

Those meals are different, under the haloes of desk lamps in the dark office. He is allowed to have this, what happens in that pool of golden light, distant from the tarry shadows outside.

...

On Ash Wednesday, he slides into one of the back pews in the church. His stomach is empty and clean. He's got bootmarks purpling on his ribs, steri-strips holding together the skin of his biceps, and he feels like he's been scraped out, a husk hollowed and paper thin. Dry, brittle. Vulnerable to the smallest lick of flames. He wants to know if hell is really a pit of fire, or if it's someplace wet like the city street in a heavy rain, the only light from the sodium streetlights on wet streets, everything covered in a layer of grime that won't wash out.

The priest says that the path to salvation is hard and narrow, that the wide and easy way leads to destruction. (Matt's teetering on that narrow path, it's cold and harsh, it's like walking barefoot on a steel tightrope)

The priest's giving a sermon now, talking about Christ in the wildness, forty days and forty nights in the desert spent fasting and praying. Forty hungry days and nights with the devil by his side, a constant companion. Matt knows the feeling.

**Author's Note:**

> A disclaimer, mandated by my personal Catholic complex-- 
> 
> I've taken liberties in this fic with Roman Catholic doctrine regarding fasting; what Matt does in my fic does not follow Catholic doctrine, (quite the opposite!) particularly not current Church doctrine. As for the modern Church, they advise prudence in terms of the mortification of the flesh (both fasting and other forms of physical suffering fall under this heading, I believe), and that it be done under the supervision of an experienced spiritual advisor.
> 
> The spirit of this fic goes back back a bit further to the Medieval enactment of mortification of the flesh, even to the Church fathers, with Saint Jerome and his penances in the desert and so forth. Matt’s behavior and his thought process is a warping of Church doctrine, because he is so emotionally wounded; his behavior and thought process in this fic would qualify as scrupulosity.


End file.
